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The Tristan Betrayal
  
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The Tristan Betrayal (Hardcover)

by Robert Ludlum (Author) "The City of Light had gone dark ..." (more)
2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

The author's death three years ago has not prevented St. Martin's from publishing recent material under his name. This WWII-era thriller opens in August 1991 as American ambassador Stephen Metcalfe arrives in Moscow, where Communist hard-liners are attempting to wrest control of Russia from the reform government. The fate of the country will be decided by an official known as the Dirizhor-the Conductor-and Metcalfe is the only man who can convince him to resist the forces of Stalinist darkness. Flash back to 1940, just after the Nazis have signed a nonaggression pact with the Russians. Young playboy/espionage agent Metcalfe is sent by American spymaster "Corky" Corcoran to the U.S.S.R. to enlist an old lover, Lana ("an extraordinary woman, impossibly beautiful, magnetic, passionate") in a scheme that if successful will change the course of history. Hot on Metcalfe's tail is assassin Kleist, a Nazi Secret Service agent who dispatches his enemies by garroting them with the E string of his violin. These principals and a host of others thrust and parry between Paris, Moscow and Berlin before a final confrontation in an enormous, mock factory fashioned of plywood and cleverly painted canvas. The factory, a bombing decoy, provides an apt metaphor for the book: a hollow, flimsy construct unable to hold the weight of a bloated plot and an army of cliched characters. All of Ludlum's trademarks are in evidence: one-sentence paragraphs, a plentitude of exclamation points, ridiculous dialogue ("Die, you bastard!") and the breathless use of italics to impart excitement, but in the end there are few surprises in this unsatisfying behemoth. Perhaps it's time to let the master rest in peace.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


From AudioFile

It's the fall of 1940. Nazis occupy France, Britain is suffering the Blitz, America is neutral, and Russia is an uneasy ally of Germany. In the classic Ludlum tradition, one man is called upon to save the free world and change the course of history. That man, Stephen Metcalfe, is assigned is to turn Rudolf von Schüssler into a double agent to implement DIE WOLFSFALLE and trick Hitler into invading the Soviet Union. Paul Michael's French, British, Russian, and German accented dialogue brings this story to life. His portrayal of the Ivy League multilingual Russo-Yank intelligence agent makes Stephen Metcalfe more well defined than the typical Ludlum character. Paul Michael breathes life into an otherwise predictable plot. K.A.T. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
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3 star:
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2 star:
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Average Customer Review
2.7 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1.0 out of 5 stars cliched, cliched, and cliched, Jul 2 2004
By justareader (yorba linda, ca United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Tristan Betrayal: A Novel (Hardcover)
fair warnig to the publisher: please stop cash-in ludlum so shamelessly. after the great writer died, all the books published under his name with or without co-authors suck big time. there's almost none of them decent enough worth reading. this is almost like a factory without quality control, book after book printed out by a single formatted software, automatically mix, reverse and change the names, places, plots....whatever you can think about and then a new book title and jacket design. did you guys outthere ever hear the 'same s..t, different day?' this could be used to ludlum's phoney books too: 'same s..t, different title.'
give it a rest, will you?
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3.0 out of 5 stars An Action-Packed Story, But It Does Not Sound Like Ludlum, April 27 2004
By George Webster, Ph.D., (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Tristan Betrayal: A Novel (Hardcover)
I always liked Robert Ludlum's stories, despite one-sentence paragraphs, stilted dialog, and contrived excitement. He gave us a grand picture of an earth-shaking event. In the case of The Tristan Betrayal, we meet Stephen Metcalfe, American secret agent, using the cover of an Argentine playboy to gather intelligence in German-occupied Paris during World War Two. But his cover is blown and his cell members killed. He has to get out of Paris, so he is sent to Moscow to try to use the love of his life, a Russian ballerina, to feed false information to the Germans to influence them to attack the Soviet Union and bring it into the war on the side of the allies. Again, his cover is blown, and he escapes to Berlin. Unfortunately, the story has a continuous set of death-threatening situations that face Metcalfe with monotonous regularity, and a set of improbable escapes each time. It reminds me of a James Bond novel, but Metcalfe is not as clever as Bond. Having said all this, I recommend the book if you are going on a long flight, or other boring activity, because the action never stops, and it will keep your attention.
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1.0 out of 5 stars The betrayal is how you feel after reading this trash, April 27 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Tristan Betrayal: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book is very bad. I found that reading it was a punishment more then anything else. I think the fact that this trash was released should be a crime. I have a problem with the so called rich playboy that runs off to serve in an intelligence agency in WWII or any war for that matter. Mr. Ludlum seemly enjoys the use of super rich heros that run around doing intelligence ground work by simply paying people off. Yet he never really takes the time or energy to focus on producting a good story that makes sense. Even intelligence agents have spenting caps and are not allowed to just come out of their bank account. Most rich people never stand up to support the war as an active field agent anyway-so I find that to be a hard pill too take. What you do find are those that capitalize on the war by selling products to the enemy or those that simply enjoy their wealth and power acting as if they are too good and wise for direct action. If you look at the "hero" of the story you would see that he seemly had no real intelligence training. I'm sorry but being rich and sleeping around doesn't make a good agent. In fact that is the type of thing that makes someone a danger to the mission. I had a problem with the fact that the enemy agent was always there. There was no logical reason for the agent to understand the heros next move but he was there. Another thing that got under my skin was the fact that his contacts were not even trained very well or were not people in the right postions to be useful to the mission. With no logical way to go under cover after he was found out I still had no idea why he was never killed. The biggest problem that I have with the hero was the amazing level of luck that never ran out. I also have a problem with the fact that this man is so sexy that women cannot turn him down. Come on? This book was the biggest joke for fiction that I have read in a long time. Please, use your time for something meaningful.
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 		 Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Not all that great
I have read every book published by Robert Ludlum, and I must say that this is quite a step down from even the weakest of his novels. Read more
Published on April 20 2004 by Thomas Marriott

4.0 out of 5 stars Taut World War II and Cold War Espionage Thriller
When Robert Ludlum died, he apparently left behind a number of partially finished manuscripts that are being completed, polished and published posthumously. Read more
Published on Feb 21 2004 by Professor Donald Mitchell

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid but not spectacular
As the years pass since the death of Robert Ludlum, it becomes less and less clear exactly how much Ludlum there actually is in the novels going out solely under his name... Read more
Published on Feb 16 2004 by Timothy J. Kindler

3.0 out of 5 stars Not his best but still Ludlum nonetheless
With Robert Ludlum's passing in 2001, it was easy to surmise that any subsequent offerings would be "something less" than if the master were still alive. Read more
Published on Jan 17 2004 by R. Shaff

5.0 out of 5 stars Even better than Sigma Protocol!
I'm a huge Ludlum fan, and at first I expected to be disappointed when I realized that the plot is set partly in WWII. Read more
Published on Jan 14 2004

1.0 out of 5 stars Hapless hero and hopeless plot
Tristan violates the most basic rule of novel writing: that the reader has to care what happens to the main characters. Read more
Published on Dec 13 2003

2.0 out of 5 stars Leaves a taste like junk food in your mouth
I realise that Ludlum's glory days are long gone, but his last few books which were (at least in part) ghost-written were still fairly gripping and entertaining reads. Read more
Published on Dec 13 2003 by Julia Flyte

4.0 out of 5 stars Even the dead write thrillers
During his lifetime Robert Ludlum was constantly criticized for his style of writing, and that has not stopped after his death. Read more
Published on Nov 29 2003 by Frank J. Konopka

1.0 out of 5 stars tristan betrayal
I have been a Ludlum fan for a long time. The last books that he wrote himself were disappointing. However, the first of the ghost written were as good as ever. Read more
Published on Nov 21 2003 by russell stern

3.0 out of 5 stars The Tristan Betrayal
I thought this that the first half of the book was written by Ludlum and the second half by someone else. Someone who did not write nearly as well as Ludlum. Read more
Published on Nov 16 2003

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